


Claroscuro

by PunkHazard



Series: Kent [3]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Desert Island Fic, Pre-Canon, casual conversation containing cannibalism, disordered eating mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-12
Updated: 2019-04-12
Packaged: 2020-01-12 06:23:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18440846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PunkHazard/pseuds/PunkHazard
Summary: There weren't many steps to this operation, the entire list of objectives looking something like:1. Break into Faraday Tech.2. Replace prototype with defective replica.3. Leave.4. ???5. Profit.Item number four turned out to be 'get shot out of the sky because another rival company had planted a well-hidden tracker deep in the circuitry for their own retrieval operation'. Item 4b was 'crash land on a submerged sandbar half a mile off the coast of a deserted island'.





	Claroscuro

If Kepler had asked him to list all the ways he thought this particular assignment would end, Daniel would've put 'wrestling the prototype they were tasked to retrieve out of the waterlogged fuselage of their helicopter in the Gulf of Mexico' pretty low on it. 

There weren't many steps to this operation, the entire list of objectives looking something like:

1\. Break into Faraday Tech.  
2\. Replace prototype with defective replica.  
3\. Leave.  
4\. ???  
5\. Profit.

Item number four turned out to be 'get shot out of the sky because another rival company had planted a well-hidden tracker deep in the circuitry for their own retrieval operation'. Item 4b was 'get stranded on a submerged sandbar half a mile off the coast of a deserted island'.

Maxwell's perched on the tail boom, hunched over her tablet with a small pack of her most irreplaceable equipment slung over her shoulder while Kepler hauls three lifejackets out of the cockpit and tosses them at Jacobi's head. Daniel catches them, diligently wrapping the experimental, engine-sized processor in the lifejackets while Kepler salvages what he can from the wreckage of the chopper and Maxwell disables the second tracker. "There _was_ a survival pack in the luggage compartment," Kepler announces as he hauls himself out of the water with a woefully light duffel bag, "but I can't get it open with what we have on hand. Dr. Maxwell, do we have a signal?" 

"Communications were damaged in the crash," she says, wary of his neutral, impassive tone. "I need some time, preferably on dry land, to set up a broadcast." 

"I can blow open the frame for our supplies," Jacobi offers, but Kepler shakes his head.

"Don't want to damage Goddard property more than we already have," he says. They can always come back for the MREs if things became desperate, and given what he knows of the Special Projects operations going on, it would be at least a few days before Goddard could send someone out to pick them up. "Have I ever told you two," he begins, to a melodious duet of groans, "about the time I missed a triathlon to stake out a Nepalese ambassador?"

* * *

Jacobi had never considered himself a weak swimmer, but it turns out the shore is either a lot further out than he'd expected or he's a lot slower than he thought. Daniel's stuck pushing the prototype (all their shoes and supplies strapped on top) with Maxwell, both of them alternately resting and kicking as a length of twine unspools from the front of the package. The end of that rope is attached to Kepler, who's swimming ahead, a clean front crawl as he cuts easily and tirelessly through the water. 

Kepler stands as soon as his feet hit sand and he wades a few meters closer to shore before he turns around and starts hauling in his subordinates, each strong pull on the twine dragging them closer. 

Jacobi and Maxwell stagger out of the surf while Kepler collects the package and dumps the water out of his boots, humming softly under his breath as he works. He hadn't bothered shrugging out of the rest of his clothes, Goddard-issue tactical gear designed to function in all kinds of environments. Moisture-wicking, breathable and fast-drying for tropical and sub-tropical climates. This particular outfit shrinks when submerged, converting to a makeshift wetsuit to cut down on drag and conserve body heat. Ideal for their exact situation, which Jacobi would find a lot more unnerving if he hadn't been with Goddard (and by extension Kepler) for the past three years. 

"What song is that?" Maxwell asks as she helps Kepler move the prototype to a dense spot of undergrowth, hiding it under tropical shrubbery. Their clothes have already shed most of their excess water and returned to their original shape, retaining just enough moisture to keep them cool as the rest of it evaporates. 

Kepler stops humming, turning a bemused look on her. "You never watched Gilligan's Island, Maxwell?"

"I may have caught it once or twice on late-night reruns."

Jacobi, in the middle of unpacking their supplies and setting out the parts for a beacon, grins cheekily at him. "Did it air when you were a kid, sir?"

"Did it air... when. I. Was. A kid." Kepler scoffs, incredulous. "Yeah, Jacobi, I used to catch it between trips to Woodstock and hits of LSD."

"So... no?"

"It came out in the _sixties_. Half of it's in black and white."

"We don't know your birthday," Maxwell pipes up, "sir."

"It's in my personnel file, which I _know_ both of you have looked at."

"Your _real_ birthday?" 

"The year is real," he reluctantly admits.

"Wow," Jacobi quips, "So the big four-oh is coming up in a bit, huh? We should do something."

Kepler levels a look of mild offense at him. "I hardly think four years qualifies as 'a bit'."

Daniel concedes that four years is longer than they've been working together, and considering the situations they get themselves into one or both of them might not even make it that long. They're not _Maxwell_ , with her foresight, and patience, and well-developed sense of self-preservation. "In a _while_ , then."

Standing up, Kepler pulls a knife from his boot and passes it handle-first it to Maxwell, then takes another one from his back pocket. He marks up the tree they'd hidden the prototype under, cutting a discreet but distinct symbol into the bark as Maxwell does the same to a few other trees in the area. "Better."

"Gilligan's Island was about a bunch of people who got stranded on a deserted island?" Maxwell asks, approaching Jacobi to help him assemble their only line of communication back to Goddard.

"Right," Kepler answers. "There's also Robinson Crusoe and The Tempest, for other light desert island reading."

"I feel like those aren't even in the realm of the same genre."

"As long as we don't run into a Caliban, we can rough it for however long we need to."

* * *

Cutter tsks softly over the line when they finally reach him. His voice comes through clearly, which is a positive for Maxwell and Jacobi's communication device assembly skills, but all three of them wince at the sound. "How did this happen, Warren?"

"Dr. Maxwell found a Halloway Industries tracker in the circuitry after we were shot down," Kepler says, maintaining a shockingly level and confident tone even while his face twists into a grimace, "and disabled it, giving the impression that the prototype was destroyed." 

Cutter's pitch drops half an octave below his normal playfully threatening cheer. It's generally a sign of how much he trusts Kepler, the importance of the missions assigned to him, but every once in a while, when he gets a request to clean up a mess that he _really_ shouldn't have to, it signals Consequences. "Can I be confident that your main objectives were completed?"

"Yes sir, we have the prototype. Put Faraday's primary tracker on the replica and left it in the labs."

Sound of rustling fabric and shuffling papers. Kepler can instantly picture the lean back in his seat, a sharp smile on Cutter's face. "We don't have anyone that can come get you right now," he says, somewhat mollified, "and I'm sure you understand the need for _discretion_ , so we can't very well call the Coast Guard."

"We understand, Mr. Cutter."

"Someone will be along in two days to pick you up. Just return to the site of the beacon, and in the meantime, have a _great_ vacation. You _are_ overdue for some time off, Warren."

Maxwell and Jacobi breathe two very loud sighs of relief. Kepler's deeply tempted to echo them, but he nods instead, slicking his hair back, away from his forehead. "Yes, sir."

"Do take care of Daniel and Alana. It would be a shame to _lose_ them."

"No question, Mr. Cutter."

"Over and out."

* * *

"I'm hungry," Jacobi gripes, stumbling over a root as they trek through the little tropical forest situated in the center of the island. Maxwell and Kepler are having a much easier time ahead of him, Maxwell no doubt because she's used to hiking through the woods and Kepler because he's _Kepler_ , and there must've been some Goddard training program for walking through tree-dense terrain. No way would he have racked up this kind of experience in _Chicago_. "My stomach is _digesting itself_."

"There should be a few sources of food on this island," Kepler calls back, "but we need to find fresh water first."

They'd left a few makeshift desalinators on the beach, rigged to collect water in the bottles Kepler had salvaged from the helicopter's cockpit, but that would admittedly take more time than Jacobi wants to wait for fresh water. "Can stomachs digest themselves?" he asks.

"The lining is pretty strong but you can get ulcers, so I'd say yes, with enough time."

"What if we don't find anything to eat?"

"We will."

"But what if we _don't_?"

Kepler comes to a stop, prompting Maxwell to pause with him as they wait for Jacobi to catch up. "Don't you two go days without a proper meal all the time?" he asks, a point of frustration for a man who'd spent a lot of resources recruiting his subordinates and lives in constant fear of losing them to self-inflicted malnutrition. Jacobi's not in _bad_ shape, thanks to Kepler's badgering, but this is more activity than is usually required of him.

Maxwell gives Jacobi an accusing look, the _Don't drag me into this_ glare, but rolls her eyes when he groans. "Yeah," Daniel says, "but that's when we have _projects_ and we're not hiking through _woods_ or when we're being _interrogated_ and just sitting in a chair."

"Oh well that's too bad for you, having to shape up and be a professional."

"What if I die of starvation?"

"We'll put your body to good use." Kepler turns, keeps walking. He nudges Maxwell's arm when she falls into step beside him. "Pit roast or open flame, Dr. Maxwell?"

"Wha-- hey!"

"Pit roast, sir." Maxwell's patience and understanding weren't bottomless, but she'd normally take Jacobi's side on this so the betrayal, even a joking one, stings. "Definitely."

"Not much in the way of seasonings," Kepler muses, "but it'll have to do." 

Great. Now they had a _topic_ to poke at and pick apart and _banter_ about, except it was one that Jacobi wanted no part of. 

"There's always salt from the ocean," Alana points out. 

"I did see some palm trees along the beach. Did you know the Vietnamese sometimes braise pork in coconut water?" 

"Jacocobi," says Maxwell, solemn.

"I hate you both so much."

* * *

Against the odds, they _do_ find a little freshwater creek on the other side of the island just removed from the beach, and Kepler's smug, self-satisfied grin just makes what should be a relatively joyous event even more infuritating for Daniel. "Well," Kepler says, dragging him back from the edge of the water, "on the infinitesimally small chance that I die first, I give you both permission to eat me."

Of _course_ there might be parasites in the water. Of _course_ Kepler had brought along a little tin can scavenged from the beach to boil it in, like some sort of survivalist magpie. Kepler reaches around Jacobi and, while the latter's brain momentarily shorts out, relieves him of the firestriker he keeps clipped to his keychain and starts a little fire on the sandy beach from an assortment of leaves and tinder. Maxwell helps him assemble some rocks into an adequate cooking surface, and after a while, she nods, almost to herself. "Me too," she murmurs. "You guys can eat me. I think I'd taste better."

"With your diet?" Kepler shoots back. "Unlikely."

"Right, because coffee makes a _great_ marinade."

"You've never had coffee in a dry rub?" He gives her a pitying look. "Remind me to take you out for barbecue sometime."

"Uh," Jacobi interrupts, simultaneously reassured and horrified at their offers, "I'm not gonna eat either of you! And you sure as _hell_ don't have permission to eat _me._ "

"You want us to starve, Mr. Jacobi?"

"You want your team to starve, Daniel?"

"You're the _worst_ ," he grumbles at Kepler, but the water boiling in the can looks more appetizing by the second after having hiked at least a mile or two on uneven terrain. "I expected this from Major Kepler, but not from you, Maxwell."

Ignoring him, Kepler takes the can off the fire and replaces it with another filled container as the first one cools. "Bets on who we eat first?"

"Jacobi," says Maxwell, with zero hesitation.

"Maxwell," Jacobi squawks in retaliation.

"I think Dr. Maxwell is right on this one."

_"Hey!"_

"Maxwell seems willing to do what it takes to survive, Jacobi! You're squeamish over a little thing like cannibalism."

* * *

"I was thinking," Maxwell says later as she guts and skins an angelfish, "that bleeding and breaking down a person might be similar to the process for boar."

Daniel, who was raised in frickin' _Milwaukee_ , stays out of her way, seeing as how he'd attempted to help and mostly just scared away the shrimp Kepler was trying to catch, then was subsequently chased away from the creek. He's used to seeing her focused, even frustrated, but this is the first time he's seen her up to her wrists in gore. From the impassive expression on her face, it's definitely not _her_ first time.

Kepler strolls back from the creek with a wriggling, squirming net constructed out of the twine he'd used to tow them to shore. "You've broken down boars before, Maxwell?"

"Hunting is a bit of a pastime where I'm from," she answers, voice dry. "Not much to do but fish and hunt."

"In terms of muscle density and size," Kepler says, "I think you're spot-on. Huh. Maybe that's why they call it long pig."

"You know we've got food, right?" Jacobi motions at the fish as Maxwell spears it with a twig and sticks the end of the skewer into the sand by their fire, fish suspended over the flame. "We're about to eat it right now? You guys don't have to talk about being eaten anymore?"

"Not every deserted island is gonna have a source of food like this," she points out, washing her hands in the creek before she returns, motioning for Kepler to hand over his shrimp. After bundling them into banana leaves (no ripe bananas, unfortunately), the little shrimp packets go into the coals, still twitching, and Jacobi sips sullenly from his can of lukewarm water while they all arrange themselves around the campfire. 

"The chance of everyone surviving a crash like that again is pretty low," Kepler says thoughtfully. "Half the job would be done already."

"How long would we be be on the island? If it's more than a few days, the bodies won't last very long."

Leave it to Maxwell to think long-term. Kepler laughs while Daniel gags at the thought of decomposing bodies in the water. "You'd have to make the leftovers into jerky."

"What the _hell_ is wrong with you two."

* * *

Jacobi finally gets a respite from the game of How Many Ways Can We Consume Each Other when Maxwell knocks out, her head on his shoulder where they sit just within range of the fire's warmth. Her incredibly messed up sleep schedule aside, not having access to a computer was a good way to bore her to unconsciousness. Their phones technically still work, though there's not much of a signal out here, and none of them packed a charger, solar _or_ manual, so they're committed to not wasting battery charge.

"All worn out," Kepler comments mildly, almost affectionately from his edge of their little camp. He's reclined in the sand, back set against a dried-out chunk of driftwood he'd hauled over, a pile of twigs and branches beside him that he slowly feeds into the fire. "Get some rest, Jacobi. I'll wake you up in a couple hours."

Whether it's a stakeout or an impromptu trip into the wilderness, Kepler rarely wakes Maxwell up to take shifts on watch. Daniel would call it _unfair_ , if Alana didn't have so much trouble getting to sleep in the first place, and she'd often be the only one awake at some ungodly hour anyway, negating the need for one of them to stay up. Once Kepler learned that he couldn't strong-arm her into a healthy, regular pattern of rest, he learned to take advantage of her odd hours when the opportunity arose. 

For now, the major _sounds_ relaxed but there's a tightness to the set of his mouth that Jacobi recognizes, tension in his neck and shoulders that hadn't loosened all day. He puts on a decent act of nonchalance, but whatever Kepler's thinking, it's got him distracted and uneasy, keyed up even after a frankly domestic dinner around the campfire.

"I dunno," Daniel retorts, grinning, "can't say I'm gonna be able to sleep when I'm surrounded by _cannibals_ , sir."

"We had dinner," Kepler shoots back, flashing him a smile that shows all his teeth, "so Daniel Jacobi lives to whine another day."

Jacobi's leaned against the trunk of an old soursop tree, one that Kepler had noted bore some fruit, but none of them could climb it before the sun set. He looks over Kepler's head, eyes on the moon over the water, half obscured behind a thick, fluffy cloud. So far away from the the coast of the mainland, their campfire the only source of light pollution, the stars are visible between even more patches of cloud, a dense band of them marking their arm of the Milky Way. 

Kepler catches him looking and turns his face up as well, scanning the sky. 

"Can you believe," he says after long moment, "we've been up there?"

Shifting, Jacobi crosses his legs in front of him and gently lowers Maxwell's head to his thigh. She makes a soft noise of complaint but nestles in without a fuss, fingers curling into the sand in front of her. "Wolf 359's in the Leo cluster?" he asks, tolerantly allowing the woman who'd been joking about steaming his shins in banana leaves just a few hours ago to use him as a pillow.

"Yeah." Squinting, Kepler orients himself to the North Star, then uses a hand to measure a few palm-lengths until he points at a break between the clouds. "Right about there. It's not visible without a telescope." 

"How do you think the new crew's doing?" 

"Fine, probably. I haven't kept tabs on it."

Daniel crosses his arms behind his head. "Be a drag if it ended like the last one."

"View's nice from a station," Kepler says, sounding almost nostalgic. He's always liked space for some inexplicable reason-- maybe the constant threat of something breaching the hull of their craft and the entire crew being vented out into the vacuum. No need to take crazy risks when simply surviving in space is already beyond what their primate brains could properly conceptualize. "No atmospheric distortion."

"I kinda like this one," Daniel sighs, letting his eyes slip shut and his shoulders relax. There's a quiet huff from across the crackle and pop of logs on the fire, then the sound of sand shifting as Kepler pulls a knee to his chest and settles in to keep watch.

* * *

They spend the first half of the next day foraging, which mostly means that Jacobi trailed behind Kepler and Maxwell while they scrambled through the wilderness nibbling on whatever semi-edible thing they can find and bringing it back to the charred remains of their campfire. Warren climbs the soursop tree, relying on two close-set palms nearby to gain enough height and make his way over to the plump, spiky fruits. Maxwell brings back two more fish, caught with a length of their twine and a paperclip Jacobi had turned up in his pocket, bent and sharpened into a makeshift hook.

Maxwell reports finding mushrooms, which she had decided were best left alone as they were without some means of identifying them, and Kepler had dragged both her and Jacobi to a banana tree, turning a leaf just enough to reveal the family of bats sleeping under it. Maxwell was fascinated, more than a little charmed-- she's seen bats in rural Montana, but not at this close range. 

They spend the second half of the day lounging around the fire as the day grows darker, working through their haul. Kepler makes a drink out of the tamarinds he'd collected and Maxwell roasts a handful of cashew nuts while they munch on the fruits. Kepler regales them with a story of a time he'd staged at a Michelin-starred trattoria in Italy, segueing halfway through to a history lesson expounding on how a cashew tree might've ended up on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

At some point he says, 'tamarind would make a great marinade for pork' and Maxwell perks up. Daniel is sure that they're doing this to spite him, but the more they exhaust the topic of eating people, covering everything from ethical questions to safety concerns, the quicker Jacobi gives up any hope of escaping this conversation. 

"The Bible doesn't expressly forbid anyone from eating human flesh," Maxwell says as the sun drops below the horizon, beginning their last night on this island, "but it is usually a sign of desperate times. And murder is frowned on, so you can't get your long pig that way." 

"I'm pretty sure the Quran allows it," Kepler adds, digging the tip of his favorite pocketknife into the soft spot of the coconut he'd spent the last five minutes husking, "since it assumes you wouldn't do it unless you had no choice. As long as you didn't kill anyone for it, you're fine." 

"What about Buddhists?" 

"Depends on the sect, but most of the big ones frown on eating meat of any kind. Sanctity of life, and all that." 

Maxwell accepts the coconut half that Kepler hands her, sipping the sweet water out of it like a round, oversized cup. "So human meat wouldn't be much worse than any other kind?" 

"Presumably." Kepler gives the other half of the coconut to Jacobi and reaches for another one, this time husking it with considerably more speed.

"Hinduism?" 

"There's at least one sect that practices cannibalism, so I'm assuming there's no _specific_ restriction in the sacred texts." Using a combination of the knife for leverage and brute force, Kepler wrenches the husk off his newest coconut and tosses it into the fire. "But there are a _lot_ of texts. Most religious orders set out rules like 'don't kill people' to maintain social order when regular ol' laws won't do the trick, so there's usually a stipulation about unprovoked murder." 

"Does 'for food' count as unprovoked?"

"You'll have to take that up with the clergy."

"What have we missed?" Alana wonders out loud, leaving just enough time for Daniel to catch on to her train of thought before she turns to him. "Jacobi?" 

It's not like he could _not_ think about it, with how much time they'd spent on the subject, and especially when the conversation turned to religion. "Don't quote me on this," he says, too tired to fight it, "but I think humans aren't even like, considered meat in the Torah. We're different enough from animals, so if you keep kosher, and eating a dead person keeps you alive so you can keep being religious, that's... allowed." 

"Really?" Maxwell's eyes brighten, her love of pattern recognition coming to the fore. "That's pretty similar to the Quran." 

"So if we then stumbled across a goat and got our hands on some milk," says Kepler, concerned as always about the practical applications, "would someone who keeps kosher be allowed to, say, drink that?" 

"I mean, assuming human meat is parve, yeah." Daniel _would_ drag his hands down his face out of exasperation, but he takes a sip of coconut water instead. Having food in his hands certainly mitigates whatever lingering fear he might have of starving to death and being eaten by his teammates. "That's fine, they can have goat milk with their human meat. But not if they wanted to eat the goat, too." 

"That's pretty neat," Maxwell comments, nodding. "Doesn't really violate the _letter_ of the law, but the spirit in which it was written. I love those."

"Does that change your position on eating me and Maxwell?" 

"It wasn't even a factor! I'm not religious." His jaw juts out, a weak defense against the mildly amused looks Maxwell and Kepler have both leveled in his direction. "I wouldn't be able to eat you guys 'cause we're a team, it wouldn't matter if it was some random stranger. I couldn't eat _anything_ if one of you died." 

Kepler grins. "Mr. Jacobi, I had no idea you felt that way." 

"Aww," Maxwell coos, smiling. She leans into his side, head thumping affectionately against his shoulder. 

"Shut up," he snaps at Maxwell. Then: "I hate both of you."

* * *

"Told you we'd be fine," Kepler murmurs as Jacobi tinkers with the beacon. He crosses his arms across his chest, looking no worse for wear after two nights of bumming it on the beach and eating food picked off the ground or from a tree. He actually looks better than usual-- less tired, less stressed, a diet of fresh food rather than cold sandwiches from the Goddard cafeteria wolfed down between stacks of paperwork. 

If he were being honest, Daniel might admit that he'd had fun, a welcome change of pace from their frenetic activity on missions. They rarely spend time together outside of work, and seeing Kepler and Maxwell in an entirely new (for Jacobi) element had been... enlightening. That they were able to coolly pull together the resources to live comfortably on an uninhabited island for two days shouldn't have come as a shock. Daniel's pretty sure he could do it if he had to, with quite a lot more anxiety and stress, but he _could_.

"I'm _not_ fine," Daniel grouses anyway, because they'd worry if he stopped complaining, "I just listened to you two talk about eating me for two and a half days."

"Well," says Kepler, dropping into a crouch beside him to watch him work, the recovered prototype in the sand beside him, "I think we all learned a valuable lesson about who we'd want on our post-apocalypse teams."

"Whatever," Daniel grumbles as static crackles through the receiver, "I'll find Klein and you two can make a cannibal cult by yourselves."

"Cannibal cult?" Cutter asks, prompting all of them to jump at the sudden intrusion. "What kind of _fascinating_ conversation have I missed?"

"We were discussing the necessity of cannibalism in a desert island scenario, Mr. Cutter. Nothing new to report otherwise, we still have the prototype."

Cutter's flair for dramatics doesn't lose to Kepler's and he allows a long silence to pass before he finally asks, "We didn't leave you out there _that_ long, did we?" He waits, as if sensing the slow grin that spreads across Kepler's face. "Warren, did you... _eat_ Alana?"

"I'm still here, sir!" 

"No, sir. Just working out some contingencies."

"Oh, I just _love_ how prepared you are." The tension Daniel had noticed on the major seems to instantly disperse at Cutter's words, his expression and shoulders relaxing into a kind of contentment Jacobi only wishes he could induce. "Someone will be along in about two hours. I'll see you back at Canaveral, Warren, and you can catch me up on _everything_."


End file.
